Back in 1998 when I first got broadband, there were no consumer grade 
routers available. They were just starting to appear as small 
business routers, and they were pretty expensive. So I took an old 
486DX66 computer, and installed NT4 workstation, and a  couple of ISA 
10Mbps NICS. One NIC connected to the cable modem = WAN, and one 
connected to  my LAN. I used fixed IP addressing on my LAN and 
assigned this NIC as my gateway. This setup would work for a Domain 
or Workgroup.

I ran Black Ice as a software firewall on the 486, and this was my 
LAN /firewall router, and it worked very well indeed. David Gillett 
described this kind of setup in one of his posts. But now routers are 
cheap, and ubiquitous, and this sort of setup would be a waste of electricity.

High end mother boards often come with dual NICS so that those who 
want to connect to a home network, and a gaming network, like a LAN 
party, can do so. People see those dual NICs, and think they can use 
both of them to increase their ISP speeds, or their LAN transfer 
speeds. List Moderator David Gillett did an excellent job of 
explaining why this won't work.

You can, at considerable expense, buy a commercial router that will 
allow you to plug two different ISPs into it...for example a cable 
modem, and a DSL modem. The purpose of this is if one network goes 
down, the other one seamlessly takes over. List Moderator Bill Cohane 
uses a setup very much like this.

Mark Rode



At 08:22 PM 3/11/2011, you wrote:
>Interesting thread.
>If it was summarized, we might say that for the vast majority of users,
>you can't use two connections  simultaneously without a whole lot of
>geeky tweaking that's of use only to the most hard-core users.

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